Architecture

You are one of the first lot owners in a new custom home development that has really dramatic views in all directions – that’s why you bought the property. Everything looks amazing – now! But what will happen when homes are built on adjacent properties in the near future?

A critical concern for the homeowner and a challenging one for the architect is to “anticipate the unexpected” with respect to view corridors. Worst case scenario: a neighbor builds the largest house possible on the land. So, how do we anticipate the unexpected? It’s not magic, but it takes a good deal of experience with the conjunction of land and architecture. The Tucson architects of Soloway Designs use proprietary visualization techniques to demonstrate to our client just how those amazing views could be negatively altered and how best to design in anticipation. Well, maybe there is some magic involved.

Designing and building a custom home represents a major investment, and this process must be truthful with respect to the budget that the client sets.

Each client has a budget, whether it be 400 thousand or 4 million, and this is a threshold they do not want to knowingly cross. The problem may arise when a client’s desires exceed what they want to spend. As an architect, it is my responsibility to create amazing architecture that suits the clients needs, wants, wishes and most importantly, their budget.

Ever since the U.S. economy took a major hit in 2009, a client’s budget has become front and center in the architectural world. The problem is most architects ignore a client’s ultimate wish to build their dream home within their budget… Whether we are designing a 500,000 dollar home or a 4 million dollar home, there is no reason why an experienced architect cannot design within a small percentage of their desired cost of construction. The stories I continue to hear is that architects are notorious for over designing thus either causing the project to be re-designed completely, the project to be canceled or making the client pay so much more than they ever wanted on their home.

We’ve been designing our new website for sometime now. The reason we chose to take our time was to ensure that it provided the users a great experience. We had always received amazing comments on our previous site but we felt that it was not as user friendly as it could be and it did not present our firm, nor our projects, like we wanted.

In creating what we wanted, we, like anyone before us, scoured the internet for other sites to see what other people did right. There were many sites that had great attributes but what was amazing is none of them were architecture firms.

We did not find anyone that provided endless photos of projects. No one who provided a wide range of design styles with multiple projects in each. A select few that offered anything about what could be done with green building and design.

The Soloway Design’s Blog will be a very different architectural blog than most of you are used to. As I consider myself a different kind of architect (in a good way!) than most, the blog that I will be writing will follow suit. Some topics will be about experiences that I have had over since I opened the firm. Others will be helpful items that can help current and future clients. I will apologize if the blogs are not beautifully written but I would rather have the ability to design gorgeous homes than be able to write eloquently about architecture. I do love to express my opinions so please bear with me.